Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution

Contributors

Brian Behlendorf is not the normal person's idea of a hacker. He is a
co-founder and a core member of the Apache Group. Apache is the open-source
web server that runs a 53% of the web servers on the publicly accessible
Internet. This means that this free program enjoys greater market share than
offerings from Microsoft, Netscape, and all other vendors combined.

Brian has worked on Apache for four years, helping to guide the
growth of the project along with other members of the Apache team. What began
as an interesting experiment is now a finely crafted, full-featured web
server.

He is not alone in this book in his dedication to music, but he
is probably the only one who has organized raves or DJ'd for parties. His web
site, http://hypereal.org/, is a marvelous
music, rave, and club resource site. He likes to read, lately reading outside
of the computing field and enjoying the Capra's Tao of
Physics and Chomsky's Secrets, Lies and
Democracy.

In late 1998, IBM announced support for Apache on its high-end
AS/400 line, a true watershed event for the Apache Project. Brian commented on
IBM's move by saying he was "Happy that I wasn't the only one who thought
there might be a business case for this. Not just fun to work on, but a model
for business. People are coming around do see that Open Source is in fact a
better way to do things on the computer, that it is healthy and can be
profitable."

Scott
Bradner has been involved in the design, operation, and use of data
networks at Harvard University since the early days of the ARPAnet. He was
involved in the design of the Harvard High-Speed Data Network (HSDN), the
Longwood Medical Area network (LMAnet), and NEARNET. He was founding chair of
the technical committees of LMAnet, NEARNET, and CoREN.

Scott is the codirector of the Transport Area in the IETF, a
member of the IESG, and an elected trustee of the Internet Society where he
serves as the Vice President for Standards. He was also codirector of the IETF
IP next generation effort and is coeditor of IPng: Internet
Protocol Next Generation from Addison-Wesley.

Scott is a senior technical consultant at the Harvard Office of
the Provost, where he provides technical advice and guidance on issues
relating to the Harvard data networks and new technologies. He also manages
the Harvard Network Device Test Lab, is a frequent speaker at technical
conferences, a weekly columnist for Network World, an
instructor for Interop, and does a bit of independent consulting on the
side.

Jim
Hamerly is a Vice President in the Client Products Division of Netscape
Communications Corporation. In June of 1997 Netscape acquired DigitalStyle
Corporation, where Jim was a co-founder, president, and CEO.

Prior to founding DigitalStyle, he was Vice President,
Engineering, of Pages Software, Inc. where he managed the development of
Pages, a desktop publishing tool, and WebPages, the first WYSIWYG web
authoring tool.

Jim spent 15 years with Xerox in various R&D and product
development activities, most recently as Deputy Chief Engineer of XSoft, a
software division of Xerox Corporation, where he was responsible for four
software product lines.

Kirk
McKusick writes books and articles, consults, and teaches classes on
Unix- and BSD-related subjects. While at the University of California at
Berkeley, he implemented the 4.2BSD fast file system, and was the Research
Computer Scientist at the Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG)
overseeing the development and release of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD. His particular
areas of interest are the virtual-memory system and the filesystem. One day,
he hopes to see them merged seamlessly. He earned his undergraduate degree in
Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and did his graduate work at
the University of California at Berkeley, where he received Masters degrees in
Computer Science and Business Administration, and a doctoral degree in
Computer Science. He is a past president of the Usenix Association, and is a
member of ACM and IEEE.

In his spare time, he enjoys swimming, scuba diving, and wine
collecting. The wine is stored in a specially constructed wine cellar
(accessible from the Web at http://www.mckusick.com/~mckusick/index.html)
in the basement of the house that he shares with Eric Allman, his domestic
partner of 19-and-some-odd years.

Tim
O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., the
publisher whose books are considered the definitive works on Open Source
technologies such as Perl, Linux, Apache, and the Internet infrastructure. Tim
convened the first "Open Source Summit" to bring together the leaders of major
Open Source communities, and has been active in promoting the Open Source
movement through writing, speaking, and conferences. He is also a trustee of
the Internet Society.

Tom
Paquin first joined IBM Research to work on a project involving parallel
processors, but ended up doing a bitmapped graphics accelerator (AMD
29116-based) for the then-new PC. After tinkering on X6 and X9 at MIT and
Brown University, he was part of the effort to ship the first-ever commercial
X11 with Carnegie Mellon University.

Tom joined Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) in May 1989, where he
had the unlucky task of integrating the GL and X. He joined Jim Clark and Marc
Andreesson at Netscape in April 1994. He was the very first engineering
manager, guiding his team through the 1.0 and 2.0 releases of Mozilla. Now a
Netscape fellow, he works on mozilla.org as the manager, problem arbitrator,
and mysterious political leader.

Bruce
Perens has been a long-time advocate for Linux and open-source software.
Until 1997 Bruce headed the Debian Project, an all- volunteer effort to create
a distribution of Linux based entirely on open-source software.

While working on the Debian Project, Bruce helped craft the
Debian Social Contract, a statement of conditions under which software could
be considered sufficiently freely licensed to be included in the Debian
distribution. The Debian Social Contract is a direct ancestor of today's Open
Source Definition.

After stepping down from the stewardship of Debian, Bruce
continued his efforts at Open Source evangelism by creating and leading
Software in the Public Interest, and by creating, with Eric Raymond, the Open
Source Initiative.

When not actively evangelizing Open Source software, Bruce works
at Pixar Animation Studios.

Eric
Steven Raymond is a long-time hacker who has been observing and taking
part in the Internet and hacker culture with wonder and fascination since the
ARPAnet days in the late 1970s. He had lived on three continents and forgotten
two languages before he turned fourteen, and he likes to think that this
fostered his anthropological way of viewing the world.

He studied mathematics and philosophy before being seduced by
computers, and has also enjoyed some success as a musician (playing flute on
two albums). Several of his open-source projects are carried by all major
Linux distributions. The best known of these is probably fetchmail, but he
also contributed extensively to GNU Emacs and ncurses and is currently the
termcap maintainer, one of those truly thankless jobs that is important to do
well. Eric also holds a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and shoots pistols for
relaxation. His favorite gun is the classic 1911-pattern .45 semiautomatic.

Among his writing credits, he has written/compiled The New Hackers Dictionary and co-authored the O'Reilly
book Learning GNU Emacs. In 1997, he posted an essay
on the Web titled "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," which is considered a key
catalyst in leading Netscape to open the source code up for their browser.

Since then Eric has been deftly surfing the Open Source software
wave. Recently, he broke the story on a series of internal Microsoft memos
regarding Linux and the threat Microsoft perceives in open-source software.
These so-called Halloween Documents (dubbed so because of their date of
initial discovery, October 31st) were both a source of humor and the first
confirmed reaction that the large software conglomerate has shown to the Open
Source phenomenon.

Every person in this in
book one way or another owes a debt to Richard Stallman
(RMS) . 15 years ago, he started the GNU project, to protect and foster
the development of free software. A stated goal of the project was to develop
an entire operating system and complete sets of utilities under a free and
open license so that no one would ever have to pay for software again.

In 1991, Stallman received the prestigious Grace Hopper Award
from the Association for Computing Machinery for his development of the Emacs
editor. In 1990 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. He was
awarded an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden
in 1996. In 1998 he shared with Linux Torvalds the Electronic Frontier
Foundation's Pioneer award.

He is now more widely known for his evangelism of free software
than the code he helped create.

Like anyone utterly devoted to a cause, Stallman has stirred
controversy in the community he is a part of. His insistence that the term
"Open Source software" is specifically designed to quash the freedom-related
aspects of free software is only one of the many stances that he has taken of
late that has caused some to label him an extremist. He takes it all in
stride, as anyone can testify who as seen him don the garb of his alter ego,
Saint GNUtias of the Church of Emacs.

Many have said, "If Richard did not exist, it would have been
necessary to invent him." This praise is an honest acknowledgment of the fact
that the Open Source movement could not have happened without the Free
Software movement that Richard popularizes and evangelizes even today.

In addition to his political stance, Richard is known for a
number of software projects. The two most prominent projects are the GNU C
compiler (GCC) and the Emacs editor. GCC is by far the most ported, most
popular compiler in the world. But far and wide, RMS is known for the Emacs
editor. Calling Emacs editor an editor is like calling the Earth a nice hunk
of dirt. Emacs is an editor, a web browser, a news reader, a mail reader, a
personal information manager, a typesetting program, a programming editor, a
hex editor, a word processor, and a number of video games. Many programmers
use a kitchen sink as an icon for their copy of Emacs. There are many
programmers who enter Emacs and don't leave to do anything else on the
computer. Emacs, you'll find, isn't just a program, but a religion, and RMS is
its saint.

Michael Tiemann is a founder of Cygnus Solutions. Michael began making
contributions to the software development community through his work on the
GNU C compiler (which he ported to the SPARC and several other RISC
architectures), the GNU C++ compiler (which he authored), and the GDB debugger
(which he enhanced to support the C++ programming language and ported to run
on the SPARC). Unable to convince any existing companies to offer commercial
support for this new "Open Source" software, he co-founded Cygnus Solutions in
1989. Today, Michael is a frequent speaker and panelist on open-source
software and open-source business models, and he continues to look for
technical and business solutions that will make the next ten years as exciting
and rewarding as the last ten years.

Michael earned a B.S. degree in CSE in 1986 from the Moore
School of Engineering, University of Pennsylvania. From 1986 to 1988, he
worked at MCC in Austin Texas. In 1988, he entered the Stanford Graduate
School (EE) and became a candidate for a Ph.D. in the spring of 1989. Michael
withdrew from the Ph.D. program in the fall of 1989 to start Cygnus.

Who is Linus Torvalds ?

He created Linux, of course. This is like saying "Engelbart
invented the mouse." I'm sure the long-term implications of the following
email:

Linus could not have foreseen that his project would go from
being a small hobby to a major OS with from 7 million to 10 million adherents
and a major competitor to the enterprise aspirations of the world's largest
software company.

Since the mass adoption of Linux and its wildfire growth through
the Internet--26% of the Internet's servers run Linux (the closest competitor
is Microsoft with 23%)--Linus Torvalds' life has changed. He has moved from
his native Finland to Silicon Valley, where he works for Transmeta
Corporation. About his work at Transmeta, he will say only that it does not
involve Linux, and that it is "very cool."

He has had two children and one patent (Memory Controller for a
Microprocessor for Detecting a Failure of Speculation on the Physical Nature
of a Component being Addressed), and has been a guest at the most prestigious
event in Finland, the President's Independence Day Ball.

His personality won't let him take credit for something as his
own when in fact it is not, and Linus is quick to point out that without the
help of others, Linux would not be what it is today. Talented programmers like
David Miller, Alan Cox, and others have all had instrumental roles in the
success of Linux. Without their help and the help of countless others, the
Linux OS would not have vaulted to the lofty heights it now occupies.

Paul
Vixie is the head of Vixie Enterprises. He is also the President and
Founder of the Internet Software Consortium, the home of bind, inn, and the
dhcp server. Paul is the head architect of bind, which is the most popular
implementation of DNS. Inn is the Internet news server package, and dhcp
allows dynamic configuration of networking information.

He is the author of Vixie cron, which is the default cron daemon
for Linux, and much of the rest of the world. This means he is probably
responsible for the strange noises your computer makes at 1 a.m. every
night.

Paul is the author of the book Sendmail:
Theory and Practice. Paul's company also manages a network for the
Commercial Internet Exchange, and leads the fight against spam with MAPS, the
Mail Abuse Protection System, which is made up of a real-time blackhole list
(where spammers have their email jettisoned into the almighty bit bucket), and
a transport security initiative.

Larry
Wall has authored some of the most popular open-source programs
available for Unix, including the rn news reader, the ubiquitous patch
program, and the Perl programming language. He's also known for metaconfig, a
program that writes Configure scripts, and for the warp space-war game, the
first version of which was written in BASIC/PLUS at Seattle Pacific
University. By training Larry is actually a linguist, having wandered about
both U.C. Berkeley and UCLA as a grad student. (Oddly enough, while at
Berkeley, he had nothing to do with the Unix development going on there.)

Larry has been a programmer at JPL. He has also spent time at
Unisys, playing with everything from discrete event simulators to software
development methodologies. It was there, while trying to glue together a
bicoastal configuration management system over a 1200-baud encrypted link
using a hacked over version of Netnews, that Perl was born.

Presently Larry's services are retained by O'Reilly, where he
consults on matters relating to Perl.

Bob
Young has always been a something of an enigma and a legend in the Open
Source community. He's a businessman, not a hacker, and has long been talked
about in Linux circles as the mythical adult who kept those North Carolina
kids at Red Hat in line.

Bob spent the first twenty years of his professional life in the
computer leasing business, heading up two different firms before getting into
the Linux world. He was the original publisher of Linux
Journal before Phil Hughes and SSC took it over. Bob joined Red Hat with
the promise that the then-members, led by Marc Ewing, wouldn't have to worry
about managing the money side of the company. He applied the rules of branding
more commonly associated with the Gap or Harley-Davidson to the world of free
software, which is exactly what was needed for a company that packaged what is
essentially a commodity: Open Source software.

Red Hat was originally going to build OEM Linux versions that
they would supply to commercial OS companies, rather than directly marketing
or retailing its own products. Only after these commercial partners failed to
get their products to market on time did Red Hat retail its own distribution,
so that the employees of Red Hat (so the story goes) would be assured enough
money to eat.

Red Hat recently received funding from the venture capital
world, and from Netscape and Intel. There's a nice irony to this confirmation
of Red Hat's success, since it was never supposed to have its own retail
products.

Chris DiBona has been using Linux since early
1995. He is very active in the Linux community. He volunteers as the Linux
International webmaster and is also the Linux International grant development
fund coordinator. He is proud to work as the Director of Linux Marketing for
VA Research Linux systems (http://www.varesearch.com/) and is the
Vice President of the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group (the world's largest at
http://www.svlug.org/).

In addition to his Linux activities, his writings and book
reviews have been featured in The Vienna Times, Linux Journal, Tech Week, Boot Magazine (now Maximum PC),
and a number of online publications. Additionally, he was the editor for two
years of the Terrorist Profile Weekly, a geopolitcal
weekly with a subscriber base numbered at 20,000.

His personal web site can be found at http://www.dibona.com/ and he can be reached
via email at chris@dibona.com.

Sam Ockman is the President of Penguin Computing,
a company specializing in custom-built Linux systems. He's the chairman of
LINC, the International Linux Conference and Exposition, which has merged with
LinuxWorld. Sam is an expert on Linux system installation and configuration,
and on Perl, which he has taught at the University of California, Berkeley
Extension School. He also coordinates speakers for the Silicon Valley and Bay
Area Linux User Groups. Sam has edited books on Unix and Perl, and writes a
monthly column on Linux. He graduated from Stanford with degrees in Computer
Systems Engineering and Political Science. Sam is very proud that while at
Stanford he won the Ram's Head Dorthea Award for Best Actor in a Drama.

Mark Stone has been using Linux as his mainstay
operating system since the 1.0.8 version of the kernel. He wrote his first
large-scale program in the late 70s: an Algol compiler for the PDP-1170. These
day he prefers scripting to compiling; his favorite language is Tcl.

Currently Mark is the Open Source editor for O'Reilly. Prior to
joining the world of publishing he was a professor of philosophy, and holds a
Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. During his tenure in academia, he
studied chaos theory and philosophy of science. So in many ways, his work
hasn't changed all that much.